Burning tables having steel supports such as burn bars or standards for supporting a workpiece in generally horizontal fashion above a water tank and adjacent a torch or similar cutting tool are well-known in the art, and examples of such can be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,341,374; 4,162,060; 3,941,361; and 3,792,846. The steel supports are often easily cut along with the workpiece during cutting operations and require relatively frequent and time-consuming as well as expensive replacement. Complicated fume-extracting equipment is generally required to prevent pollution problems. Although these problems have been reduced somewhat by providing readily removable steel supports with a water surface closely adjacent the supporting surface, the burning tables of the prior art still suffer from several disadvantages. Individual replaceable supports are usually quite large and costly. The supports are usually widely spaced so that smaller cut parts fall below the level of the support surface. Gratings located below the water level between the supports are utilized to catch small pieces of falling metal, but these pieces can be difficult to retrieve and can subject the operator to burns if they are retrieved by hand before being properly cooled. Densely packed supports or supports with large cross-sectional areas are not suitable since blowback of the cutting arc with impeded cutting can occur as the cutting tool moves directly over the support.
The slag and other materials which fall from the workpiece being cut must drop through the water and be periodically removed, and numerous devices for cleaning the bottom of the tanks have been devised, including those discussed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,969,132 and 3,770,110. Various arrangements of sloped bottoms and floor with flushing structure such as nozzles or selectively opening and closing drain channels have been suggested, but none of these devices has been entirely satisfactory. The close proximity of the tank bottom to the floor prevents use of a steep incline to cause the slag to settle to one end of the tank.